I am reading two books, published last year and the year before, but which arrived to me recently: they were published far away, and now book connections between different cities of our country have greatly weakened, to say nothing of different parts of the post-Soviet space. Both authors are famous archaeologists, and both were expelled from central scientific institutions.

Traditionally, the performance of the scientist was evaluated by the number of articles. Then there was citation. Finally, in 2005, the Hirsch index, h. This is a very indicative value. The index is equal to H if a person has h of articles with citation above H. That is, if h = 12 (which is considered a good result), then a person has 12 articles, each of which has citation above 12. Hirsch-index is good because it distinguishes stable scientists who give out a lot of good works.

On June 6, I accidentally came across some TV show, the participants of which were talking, naturally, about Pushkin. The general pathos, as usual, was that culture was dying (for some reason it is accepted that it is intelligent to think so). In this regard, one of the participants told a funny story from the time of the celebration of Pushkin’s 200th anniversary.

Articles in HTML: 11/22/2011 PDF: TrV No. 23 (92N) for 2011: “Our everything” - a guy from Mishaninskaya Announcement of the issue “Our Everything” - a guy from Mishaninskaya (page 1) Alexey Levin November 19 marked the 300th anniversary of the birth of Mikhailo Lomonosov, who is rightly considered the founder of the modern scientific tradition in Russia....

TrV continues a survey among famous Russian scientists about the popular science books that had the greatest influence on them. For the answers of the physicist M. Katsnelson and the sociologist A. Hoffman, see TrV No. 53, geochemist and crystallographer A. Oganov and criminologist J. Gilinsky - in TrV No. 54. In this issue we publish the answers of the virologist, Dr. med. Sciences, professor, academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, head.

I love going to lectures at the Polytechnic Museum for two diametrically opposed reasons. On the one hand, in just an hour and a half, there is an opportunity to learn about a particular field of science from a specialist in this field, i.e., to look at it from the right angle, which is often very different from the point of view of a non-specialist observing science “ outside".

Professor Vernon Heywood from Great Britain was unable to come to the readings dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of his friend, academician A.L. Takhtadzhyan, - it was not possible to obtain a visa on time. The UK is not one of the countries that have signed the Schengen Agreement, and in order to obtain a Russian visa, the Queen's subjects need an invitation from the migration service (our foreign colleagues sometimes call it the “yellow paper”). The invitation was received.

Good books, written a long time ago and widely known in our time, have a common property: they can be read without context. A person may know nothing about Lotman, have an extremely vague idea of ​​the realities of the 19th century, and enthusiastically read “Eugene Onegin” as a well-written book about love, and not as an encyclopedia of Russian life. But often, separation from context leads to unexpected distortions of perception.

article Alexander Merzhanov’s opens a new “Tribune” section. The idea is to give the opportunity to speak out to scientists whose professional merits and high status are undoubted, regardless of how much their statements contradict the editorial point of view. At the same time, the editors refrain from any comments, and the materials are not subject to significant editorial changes. What does “merit” and “high status” mean?

...Our present is a consequence of our past, but in our minds our the past depends on ours present Raymond Aron The journal Anthropological Forum published an interesting study. ( http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/05/ ). P.S. Kupriyanov (historian and anthropologist) and L.V. Sadovnikova (employee of the State Historical Museum and its branch “Chambers in Zaryadye”) used oral interviews to study the perception of residents of the former Moscow Zaryadye district of their former habitat.

Dear editors! Russia Day has passed, which the whole country celebrated joyfully and vigorously, the hurricane has subsided, and the sun is shining in some places. Everyone would be happy about life, but no - whispers of dissatisfaction can be heard from the fraternal St. Petersburg State University.

On June 24-25, 2010, the conference “Scientific Diaspora and the Future of Russian Science” will be held in St. Petersburg [1]. Its organizers hope that the participants of the upcoming forum will be able to discuss in detail and develop common ideas about proposals for creating a new friendly environment that will allow representatives of the diaspora to interact with Russian colleagues and develop domestic science and higher education on a global scale.

If you think that scientists react to the World Cup only like ordinary people - watching the matches, drinking beer and placing bets with the whole laboratory, then you are deeply mistaken. Some scientific groups have made football the object of their research. TrV correspondent Alexey Paevsky got acquainted with some of the works . Of course, robot creators pay the most attention to football.

For specialists studying Ancient Russia, an important event took place last week: the Facial Chronicle Code began to be made publicly available on the Internet. This work is scanned and posted on the Internet by the Society of Lovers of Ancient Writing. You can download the pdf of the first volume on the website http://oldp.sterligoff.ru . Why is this event so important? The main thing in the work of a historian is sources, primarily written ones.

The closest galaxies to us that leave the dwarf category are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The first is located at a distance of about 160 thousand light years from us, the second - 200 thousand. The clouds are gravitationally connected to each other, the distance between them is about 75 thousand light years. Each of the Clouds makes up several percent of the mass of our Galaxy, which, given the large size of the latter, is by no means small - billions of stars.